Page 64 of The Dangerous Dance

For now, that is enough.

I do not sleep.

He does, eventually. I feel it in the change of his breathing first, the slow descent into the rhythm of a man whose body has finally accepted that the day is over. His arm stays heavy across my waist. His chest rises and falls steady against my back. The bandage on his arm has stayed clean, which is something.

I lie very still.

I think about Italian corridors and dock access logs and the way Viktor's voice goes flat when he is performing patience rather than exercising it. I think about Dara at the apartment in Astoria with the light on. I think about a job that was hers tonight that I took without telling either of them, and a man in this bed who tracked me through it and came to me bleeding and said you are not disposable and meant it.

I think about you matter said in the register of a man who does not say things he does not mean.

I think about my father, who declined an assignment and died for it and did not have anywhere else to be when he made the decision.

I have somewhere else to be.

It is in this bed.

Which is the problem, and is not the problem, and which I am going to have to sit with for longer than the four hours between now and morning if I am going to do the thing I have been turning in my head since Viktor's voicemail last week. The thing I have not said yet. The thing I have been building toward without permitting myself to look at it directly, which has the shape of a coffee shop in a neighborhood designed to be unmemorable and a story I have not yet constructed.

I close my eyes.

I do not sleep.

But I stay.

CHAPTER 21

Nadia

I leave at four forty-seven in the morning.

Not because I have decided to. Or rather, I have decided to, but the decision was made somewhere below the level of deliberation, in the part of me that runs the calculations before the thinking catches up, and when I surface from the not-quite-sleep I have managed in the bed beside him I find the decision already there. Formed and waiting.

He is asleep.

Actually asleep, the deep kind, the rest his body has been refusing him for weeks finally claimed at the end of a day that took everything he had. I have been listening to the sound of it for an hour, the slow even rhythm of a man who has trusted the room enough to go fully under. His arm is still across my waist. His face is turned toward me on the pillow. The cut on his cheekbone is dark in the lamp light I left on low.

I move carefully.

His arm slides off me without him waking, which tells me how far under he is, and the part of me that has been trained since I was nine to be quiet does what it has been trained to do. I get out of the bed. I dress in the dim light, the clothes I came in, the ones still folded on the chair where he hung them last night because he is the kind of man who folds clothes even when he is bleeding.

I look at him on the pillow.

I look at the burner on the table.

I pick up the burner.

I leave the glass of water where he set it.

At the bedroom door I stop and look back at him once. He has not moved. The bandage on his arm is still clean. The rhythm of his breathing has not changed. Whatever Viktor is going to ask me when I sit across from him in the next hour, the answer that matters is in this room, asleep, with his arm where my waist was a moment ago.

I close the door behind me without sound.

The walk to the subway takes eleven minutes. The ride to a neighborhood I have used before as a transit point takes twenty-three. By the time I am above ground again in the cold pre-dawn dark, I have done the thing I have been avoiding doing, which is constructing the story I am going to tell.

The story needs to be specific enough to be believable and vague enough to be unverifiable. It needs to account for the five days at the safehouse in a way that does not expose the Connolly intelligence, because if Viktor knows about Connolly he will know I have been working against him, and if he knows that the conversation I am about to have takes a direction I am not prepared to survive. It needs to explain my continued communication with Viktor during those five days in a way that is consistent with covert management of a difficult situation.

And it needs to explain why I am coming back now rather than earlier or later, which is the detail that will be examined most carefully because Viktor understands timing the way I understand it, which is as the thing that reveals what everything else is trying to conceal.